Writing about, inspired by, and tangentially related to the work of the great Trinidadian Marxist

Monday, September 10, 2012

The Pedagogy of Pickets; Or, Let's Do It for the Kids!

The struggle against
austerity continues. With the struggle comes the whole set of neoliberal
discursive maneuvers through which mouthpieces of capital attempt proving that
tight fiscality is coterminous with a loving sentimentality. Not only are
teachers’ demands opposed to anything like fiscal discipline, but the very
articulation of these demands shows that, well, they just don’t care. Relations
of care are best derived from the calculations of accountants. The Chicago
Teachers Union, Mittens tells us, has “turn[ed] its back” on “the hundreds of
thousands of children in the city’s public schools to provide them a safe place
to receive a strong education.”
Fiscality and sentimentality operate conjointly to effect a decisive
displacement: they serve to depoliticize the antagonism between State-capital
and labor. The necessity of caring for children, like the necessity—not matter
how hard it is, how tight the belt becomes—to follow rigorously the demands of
stingy accountancy, trumps any assertion of autonomous will, of freedom. Within
this discursive field, the assertion of any political subjectivity requires, as
a prior movement, the cultivation of an indifference toward the Child and the
city’s Books—a turning-away, a turning-one’s-back-on, a willful neglect of
one’s duties to Capital and Kids. Neglecting fiscal necessities is coterminous
with neglecting one’s pedagogical duties to children; to resist the one is to
attack the other; “[t]eachers unions have too often made plain that their
interests conflict with those of our children.”

Obviously, this is all
horseshit, but that doesn’t mean that the figure of the Child, of the
Children—all 400,000 of them, deprived of any adult care, left out on those
dangerous Chicago streets—hasn’t been and won’t continue to be effective in
determining public response to the strike. Much of the CTU’s defense of its
action necessarily stakes a claim to being in the Child’s best interests:
teachers’ conditions are students’ conditions, small classrooms benefits
everyone, and so on. These claims are, I think, true, and they are important
claims to make. But what really intrigues me, here, is the absurdly reductive
concept of pedagogy that organizes responses to the teachers’ decision to
strike. “Teaching” seems to be isolated to the slice of space-time we call the
classroom; it only takes place during the school year, when performance can be
enumerated and evaluated with faux precision. We already know that this
definition of teaching is made in something like bad faith. After all,
“teaching” is seen as a vocation that extends beyond the confines of the
classroom to wider networks of sociality and identity formation. A “caring”
teacher is the one who works beyond the actual scene of pedagogical
production—that is, one who hyper-exploits herself by working outside of the
education factory in the social factory more broadly writ: coaching teams,
advising clubs, writing recommendations, being a mentor, and being, in general,
a role model. As a disciplinary norm, “teaching” demands a set of behaviors
that extend beyond the circuit of educative production into the circuit of
social reproduction. Yet, the fact of this extension is carefully elided when
minimalist definitions of pedagogy are proposed so as to chastise teachers for
not caring about their kids. Anyone, however, who has walked by or walked in a
picket line knows that teachers are not “turning their backs” on
children—they’re facing the street, addressing the public at large, and are
more than willing to explain to anyone—children such as their students or
childish brats like Rahm—why they’re striking.

The picket is a pedagogical
scene. So, what does it teach?

Let’s see if we can derive
any lessons from the manner in which Rahm encodes the strike: “This is not a strike I
wanted,” Emanuel said. “It was a strike of choice … it’s unnecessary, it’s
avoidable and it’s wrong.“ Clearly, Rahm refuses to understand the centrality
of disappointment to democracy, to understand democracy as a mode of
living-through the non-conformity of wills. But let’s stick with these middle
modifiers, “unnecessary” and “avoidable.” The question, of course, is:
unnecessary for whom? Obviously, the
strike is only “unnecessary” and “avoidable” from the perspective of a
neoliberal accountancy operation that is willing to continually subtract the
value of labor in order to enhance the freedom and value of capital. But this
perspective is posed as delinked from any political subjectivity: it’s not Rahm
the neoliberal opposed to the strikers, it’s just good economic sense
(supplemented by a sentimental care for displaced kids) that determines the strike
as “wrong.” By declaring the strike unnecessary and avoidable, Rahm gestures to
a rationality exorbitant to the interests of both the city and the teachers—a
fiscal causality that should coordinate the entirety of social life, a
causality that is well nigh natural and objective. The teachers are, in effect,
narcissistically fighting the way of the world.

Let’s agree with Rahm. Let’s
say, indeed, that the strike is “unnecessary,” “avoidable”; let’s say that we
will never be able to derive with any kind of scientific or apodictic
certainty—calculate and compute as much as you will—the eruption of a strike. A
brief course through history shows that submission to the heteronomous
compulsion of economic necessity is the norm: subsistence limits have always
been downwardly flexible, and real wage packages have been on a decline for
centuries. It is this fact that precisely constitutes the eventalness of
working-class revolt. Despite our habituation to heteronomy, it remains the
case that the Atlantic world has—for centuries—seen action underived from
necessity as the paradigm of ethico-political freedom. Freedom begins in the
nonlinearity of the unnecessary, in the space of compossibility opened by the
co-presence of the “avoidable” action with other courses of being. What Rahm is
telling us, in short, is that the striking teachers, having set upon an
unnecessary and avoidable course, are operating according to a self-given
teleology of freedom.

It seems clear to me, at
least, that the cultivation of a taste for freedom is a primary pedagogical
responsibility of teachers. (Even a gross, reactionary, conservative ass would
agree with that; it’s the Enlightenment-era genetic code of instituted
learning.) This cultivation will not (and cannot) always take place in a
classroom, particularly when classrooms are defined (as by Mittens above, and
many others worried about 400,000 kids on the street) as little more than
daycare centers (or prison cells). The picket line generates a new pedagogical
scene, and, ultimately, establishes the same breach in our understandings of
freedom as the third antinomy Kant draws in the third critique. On one side, we
have those who believe that the movement of the world should be organized
simply be natural-economic rationalities, laws. On the other side, those who
know that natural-economic rationalities are not the sole determinants of human
action—that there’s another causality, vague and obscure, that begins when a
subject “turns her back” on necessity and lives the irreducible possibility of
making an event. The Child, that figure derived from neoliberal accountancy,
might feel neglected by this inaugural neglect of necessity. Actual children,
however, might be getting a lesson in the (a)causality of freedom.